Thread by @LorenCrowe

During my first deployment to Afghanistan, my platoon was caught in a massive, well-designed ambush. Heavy machine guns on high ground, RPGs in close.

The impact hit like a hammer to the chest. Casualties. Chaos.

There's a point to this, I promise. 🧵

https://twitter.com/kylegriffin1/status/1540339085230968834

My guys who weren't immediately wounded did all the right things. They returned fire with everything they had, and we pushed our vehicles forward.

But the trap was too well set. They had us. We were fucked. Our vehicles were being torn to shreds and the guys inside were next.

Right in the middle of the kill zone set for us, the vehicle in front of mine stopped. Lights off. Blocking the road. No gunner in the turret. He was dead, probably.

And the only reason that the vehicle would stop in that situation was if it had been disabled by the attack.

My driver saw there was nowhere to go, and we were being pounded by gunfire and RPGs that were nearly breaking through our armored windows and denting our inches-thick doors.

I thought we were dead, to the extent I was thinking at all. More accurately, I felt we were dead.

The truth about combat is that no one rises to the occasion when everything's going to hell. You sink to whatever level of training you have.

My driver asked me what to do. I shrugged and told him, "Keep going!"

I figured we were either going to die stuck, die trying to get out, or escape. There was no reason not to try.

We rammed the disabled vehicle in front of us. It moved. Just a little bit. But it moved.

Progress.

But the bullets kept coming. And there was a cliff straight ahead.

All my radios were dead and I had no idea if anyone in the disabled vehicle was still alive. No one seemed to be steering it as we pushed. I wasn't going to run five guys off a cliff to save everyone behind us, so I got out on my ambush-side door and ran around to take the wheel.

I somehow made it to the disabled vehicle's driver's door and found the driver alive inside, but in a bad way. Blood everywhere. All over him. His and everyone else's.

I asked him if he wanted to live. Dazed, he said yes. I told him that we'd keep pushing if he'd keep steering.

He understood. What else was there to do? Die in an ambush? Die in a river at the bottom of a cliff? Or maybe live? He chose to keep going.

It worked. We missed the cliff and made it around a rocky bend. Just out of the main kill zone, though still under fire.

Progress.

Then calamity. My vehicle died. The engine compartment was torn apart by RPGs and gunfire. Who knows how many things broke.

Two vehicles now blocked the road.

Long story short, we kept going. Every twenty meters brought a new catastrophe that could have ended everything, and all of us. At one point, I wondered how I was still alive. At another, I wished I wasn't.

But thanks to dozens of decisions to keep going, the platoon escaped.

It took hours to get out of contact and more to get home. We didn't all make it. I lost one friend, the gunner of the disabled vehicle, and a dozen of us were wounded.

This is the story of the worst day of my life, but it's about choosing to move forward when all seems lost.

I feel like the country is stuck. I honestly don't see how we get out of this trap we're caught in, I don't know how to compromise on human rights, and I don't know how to break through to people who don't view people with differences as fully human.

This hurts. I love my country. I've bled for my country. Call me naive and sentimental but I truly believe that a functional United States, for all our flaws, is essential to the well-being of billions of people here and around the world. Whatever replaces us will be worse.

I know in my gut that the only thing to do is to keep going. Keep making progress. Because there's no other choice. The alternative is a nightmare for hundreds of millions here and more people abroad.

I don't have a lot of answers about what to do next, but my gut tells me that the answers are local. The courts are gone for a generation. The feds are going to be unreliable. No one is coming to save us anymore.

Nobody's coming but us.

Those of us lucky enough to live in blue enclaves need to turn them into fortresses. Whatever federal protections we thought we needed should be doubled at the state level. Local offices for civil rights protections in every town. Civil rights are local infrastructure.

We also need to recognize a duty to those who aren't lucky enough to live in deep blue cities. We need to encourage civil rights migration to places where people can live and thrive as they are. We need to spend money on this. Housing. Relocation grants. Health care. Support.

What good are blue cities to a Texas family with a trans kid if they can't afford to move here? What's the use of us at all? Republicans want a red wall on the southern border? We've built a blue wall of housing costs and sky-high costs of living.

Tear that shit down.

We need to center those closest to the pain and let them say what the solutions should be. This should be easy since the pain is going to fall on around half the country, but we know that some communities will feel it more than others, as always

I have a few irons in the fire that I hope to be able to say more about in the next few weeks. But for now, I'm going to let myself grieve and mourn the loss of a future that I imagined but will probably never see.

But as soon as I'm done, I'll figure out how to keep going.

This thread was kind of a pep talk to myself and a sketchpad to work through what I'm feeling. If it was helpful to read, then I'm glad. If I'm omitting something or getting something wrong, then I'm not surprised. Work in progress. /x

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